


Void

by Teanjel



Series: Reflections [3]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Cloth (Hollow Knight) - Freeform, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Recovered Memories, Siblings, i have no idea what else to tag this as, more reflections from the knight, white palace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 04:30:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16360829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teanjel/pseuds/Teanjel
Summary: The knight ventures into the Abyss a second time and remembers at last where he came from.





	Void

I am so sick of dreaming.

I have wandered dreaming through a white palace laced with a hundred sharp deaths. A king limp on his throne. _No cost too great._ Dead, perhaps - dead in dreaming? He gave me no answers. I woke with half a charm in my hand.

Half of a whole. White fragments to strike and seal like a closing door. One from a white dream at the bottom of the world. The other from the great lady in the deadly garden. The garden where a friend gave her life for me.

Cloth. She called me her inspiration, but she was mine. Named me brave, though I was not. I’m not brave. I’m an idiot who challenged the best of the Mantis Tribe because I wanted to know what was on the other side of a door. I started a creaking tram car, ate a strange crystal, threw money in a dark fountain, just to see what would happen. I’m stubborn and curious and proud and I never know what I’m doing. And I’m lonely. I don't know if I realized it until I saw that other in Deepnest. Thought I saw. I was so glad, for a moment. I worried to see a sibling with no light. But it was only a cruel trick. A snare for hopes. Nosk could tell me no answers.

But there were answers here, in this place of my birth. I had left in fear. So, waking from that white dream I returned.

In that second visit the mound shook and parted beneath my feet. I slipped down and found a maze of the dead. Eyes in the dark. Whispering shadows. So many. How deep do these broken pieces lie? So many empty faces. I drew myself downward, searched every corner to find the same pattern. Shade and shadow, cracks and shards.

A face. My face, moving as I moved. My lantern, my mask reflected in the dark, and no way forward. I stared at my reflection. Who was I? What was I? How was I alive among so many dead? A strange idea came to me then. Perhaps a desperate idea, lonely in the dark. I took the dream nail and turned it on my own image. And I remembered.

 

I remember a figure drifting down from above. An impact. Another. Siblings falling. Near or distant.

I remember finding myself alive in a mound of dry shells. Shaking them off. Standing on the surface and gazing upward. I remember climbing toward a light. A call, a voice. Was it in the air or only in my head? It pulled me onward. _No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering._ Stone to stone, I climbed to the light as the others fell around me. There, there was the voice, and white shining through a doorway. I leapt for the rail, pulled myself up, and stopped.

And I saw you. And I knew. The words were not for me. They were for you. I stopped and stared, because, if the call was not meant for me, what was I? Why had I climbed out of the dark? But you turned around and looked back. And that living pair of eyes. The face facing me...It was like nothing else. Nothing else I could ever imagine. Not light or dark. Not fragment or fall. Kinship. Curiosity. Sorrow? It startled me like a nail-blow. 

The door sealed behind you. The world shook. I lost my grip, and fell. Fell like all the broken ones, back into the dark.

I feel that dark slipping around me again. A soft clutter of broken masks sliding past each other. It's familiar now. A comfort, like a mother's voice, for I remember no mother, only this place. I could lie here forever. The shades of my lost siblings drift above me, no longer fearful. We know each other again. It is safe, in the dark. Would I forget once more, slip out of time for another age? But that would be to hide. To face nothing.

 

I think I know where to find you now. I think I know why I returned to Hallownest.

Maybe those words were for me, after all.

_You shall seal the blinding light that plagues their dreams._

Just a little longer. I am coming.

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't think I'd write another of these because I thought this game was done surprising me. I was completely unprepared for this. Wow.
> 
> Like Witness, I'm posting this before I enter the Black Temple, though I'll probably wait until tomorrow to see what it holds. (I kind of know some things. But it doesn't make sense yet. Get the impression it'll be a challenge.)
> 
> Also, I just created the tag 'The Knight & The Hollow Knight.' Seriously?
> 
> EDIT, 1/25/2019  
> Was rereading this and decided to make a couple quick changes - added the cry suffering line and "I think I know why I returned to Hallownest."  
> Heh, it's a sign of how much I like this that I'm here editing it months later. My response to old stuff tends to be leaving it in its original state because I'm done with the idea or wanting to completely rewrite it.


End file.
